High spike damage WotE

Hi all,
yesterday me and my guild try Will of the Emperor for the first time.

after a few attempts to understand how to avoid the combo-kill,
I noticed a blunder of damage on me, I try to always use all my CDs but sometimes I see my life go from 100% to 50%.
Can you help me with some advice or info on what to wear to deal with most of this fight?

You always want some sort of cooldown up. I rotate DRW, boneshield, vamp blood with pet sack and iron bark from our resto druid. Using IBF on 1st and 3rd titangas and at the end of the fight if the boss isn't dead yet. Building up a big bloodshield during the dance and timing your DS also helps.

Using darkmooncard (on use macroed into DRW) and the elegon trinket. Mehman's suggestions are good if you don't have those 2.
Get the shado-pan revered headpiece if you can it's great

You always want some sort of cooldown up. I rotate DRW, boneshield, vamp blood with pet sack and iron bark from our resto druid. Using IBF on 1st and 3rd titangas and at the end of the fight if the boss isn't dead yet. Building up a big bloodshield during the dance and timing your DS also helps.

Using darkmooncard (on use macroed into DRW) and the elegon trinket. Mehman's suggestions are good if you don't have those 2.
Get the shado-pan revered headpiece if you can it's great

This for the most part, however, the DMC card should not be macro'd into DRW. You end up losing a usage of it every 3 minutes this way. A much better trinket is the shado-pan revered one or the trash drop one. (Stam/mastery on use). I would suggest you macro this trinket into vampiric blood as the mastery and the healing boost are huge when stacked together. (vamp blood buffs the heal which triggers a shield that is larger due to trinkte).

Elegon trinket is nice, however, if you can get it, get the trash and shado-pan revered one. While they trigger a cd off each other, you can use them back to back for 50% uptime of 3.5k mastery. Its a fairly substantial increase.

Tanking this boss should be done in 2 ways at the same time:

1. taking melee hits, you should pay extra attention and focus on timing your death strikes just after boss hits in order to maximize the heal you recieve.

2. During the combo, over the first ~5 secs of it, you should spam and attempt to build a large blood shield. For the rest of the combo, you should slightly pool your runes without capping them so that you can be ready when he starts meleeing again.

I would suggest you macro this trinket into vampiric blood as the mastery and the healing boost are huge when stacked together. (vamp blood buffs the heal which triggers a shield that is larger due to trinkte).

Just as a point of clarification, Vamp blood has no effect on the healing that DS does and would not affect your blood shield either. DS healing is only affected by 2 things. The first is your maximum health pool, which buffs the minimum amount that DS will heal for and the second is how much damage you've taken in the last 5 seconds.

For the OP, as far trinkets go the DMC and shadowpan / trash drop trinkets will probably be the best combo for this fight. The DMC card is probably the single most over budgeted item in the game right now so take advantage of it if possible.

As others have suggested try to stack a blood shield during the combo and once you come out of the combo wait until after the boss swings before you death strike, giving you a greater chance of receiving more than a minimum heal. Be sure to keep up bone shield coming into the combo with an absorb up. Once every rotation you should be able to cycle things like, ghoul sack, vamp blood, lichborne heals(this heal scales with vengeance so use it later on just before the combo starts again while your vengeance is at its highest), IBF, DRW, etc.

Just as a point of clarification, Vamp blood has no effect on the healing that DS does and would not affect your blood shield either. DS healing is only affected by 2 things. The first is your maximum health pool, which buffs the minimum amount that DS will heal for and the second is how much damage you've taken in the last 5 seconds.

I don't believe this is correct. First of all, it is also pumped up by the Scent of Blood passive!

Anything that increases your healing taken or healing done should improve the healing provided by Death Strike, as far as I am aware. Although, it might apply funny (by, for example, checking the healing done based on the damage you've taken and adding all healing boosting effects, and if that still isn't above the minimum amount healed by the ability, it will just heal the minimum amount and that will be unaffected by healing-increasing effects). I could be wrong on this, so some elaboration might be useful

Just as a point of clarification, Vamp blood has no effect on the healing that DS does and would not affect your blood shield either. DS healing is only affected by 2 things. The first is your maximum health pool, which buffs the minimum amount that DS will heal for and the second is how much damage you've taken in the last 5 seconds.

Death Strike's heal is affected by all modifiers, (both positive and negative) however the consequent Blood Shield is based off the unmodified heal. This means your Blood Shield is only affected by damage taken and Death Strike's actual heal has nothing to do with it.

Death Strike's heal is affected by all modifiers, (both positive and negative) however the consequent Blood Shield is based off the unmodified heal. This means your Blood Shield is only affected by damage taken and Death Strike's actual heal has nothing to do with it.

Thanks for the clarification Vereesa. I guess the only thing I ever pay attention to is my absorbs which is why I knew it didn't affect them in any way. I'm glad to know that the heal itself can be modified, although I can't imagine it would impact play style or decision making much, considering it isn't as significant as the absorb in most cases. Thanks again.

Death Strike's heal is affected by all modifiers, (both positive and negative) however the consequent Blood Shield is based off the unmodified heal. This means your Blood Shield is only affected by damage taken and Death Strike's actual heal has nothing to do with it.

I just tested in order to find out how it all works for sure. Here is what I found out.

Vampiric blood increases the heal but not the blood shield.
Scent of blood increases both the heal and the blood shield, so technically this is probably the only thing that will buff your shield other than mastery boost.

I just tested in order to find out how it all works for sure. Here is what I found out.

Vampiric blood increases the heal but not the blood shield.
Scent of blood increases both the heal and the blood shield, so technically this is probably the only thing that will buff your shield other than mastery boost.

and thanks for clearing up, macroing them doesn't have any increase.

Thanks for clearing it up. To be fair, I never really even thought of SoB affecting the Shield because it always said it was a healing increase and assumed it'd work exactly like all the rest.